Entertainment

WikiAnswers Still Growing Strong, While Yahoo Answers Declines

According to the latest Hitwise report on Q&A sites, Yahoo Answers still dominates with nearly 75% of the market, but WikiAnswers is following up as a not-yet-close second, pulling 18.35% of the market. Part of the Answer.com family, WikiAnswers has seen a 125% growth spurt since last June, and hit 1 million questions last November. Yahoo Answers, on the other hand, has seen a 21% decline since last March.

While WikiAnswers didn't have the most growth in the past year (WikiAnswers is only measurable since last June), leaving the biggest growth spurt to Amazon's Askville with a 316% increase since last March, WikiAnswers is still quite proud to have taken the #2 spot in only 9 months. In fact, it appears as though Yahoo has plateaued somewhat, with 49% of its visitors being returning users, and 52% being new visitors.

WikiAnswers, on the other hand, has 24% of its visitors as returning users, and 76% being new visitors. Yahoo still tops the list on the amount of time spent at the site, so it's clear that Yahoo still takes the cake when it comes to user-generated Q&A, so it's no wonder the space continues to become saturated with niche Q&A sites, such as Girls Ask Guys and the upcoming shouldi.

To WikiAnswers' growth, however, the company attributes its unique (wiki) approach to Q&A. Instead of a collection of answers from various users, WikiAnswers has an ongoing "edit" process in order to provide a singular response to a given question. Besides this, WikiAnswers is also boasting of the passion of its users, and its use of triggers, which relates various questions to each other, curbing any differentiation that may occur as a result of two people asking the same question in different ways.

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